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Questions Nov17 | Hope Adverts

Over the past three months, a small team of volunteers have been working hard to produce an evening of entertainment. Over the past two nights, this work has been presented to over 400 people in the form of videos, plays, music and discussion panels.

The ‘Questions’ event is an initiative of Holy Trinity Church, Leicester, a church that I am an active member of. The evening is meant to be an evening of entertainment around a set theme, to invite people unfamiliar with churches in and help them consider the bigger questions in life.

This time the subject was simply ‘Hope’.

Now that is quite a broad subject, and it took us a good two of the three months to actually come up with any ideas that had legs! We were running quite close to the line, and then had a couple of break-throughs; ideas and sketches seemed to click into place, scripts got written and re-written (and re written), and with two days to go before the first night, we had our first script run though.

Needless to say we were all quite stressed.

So the event ran last night and the night before, and I have to say, we got a lot of positive feedback. The audience seemed to really enjoy the entertainment and get engrossed in the discussion panel. we got the laughs when we needed them and held their attention throughout the night.

My role was as a volunteer on the creative team. I came up with idea after idea, bouncing them off the rest of the team and seeing what stuck. In the end, a school of thought that there are four main ‘hope’ personalities (False Hope, Real Hope, No Hope and Lost Hope, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope#Hope_theory), inspired a set of adverts posted below.

In these adverts, each hope type is advertised as a soft drink. taking tropes from some modern adverts, I sat on my train commutes to work and sketched away, making storyboards and finally the Animatic style videos below. And yes, that is my voice throughout.

From here the idea evolved. We would show the Hope Maxx, Hope Noir and Hope Zero adverts in between other slots throughout the night, finally coming to a head in a Dragon’s Den sketch which I wrote with the help and input from the rest of the team. The script can be read below. On the night(s) I played the part of the Pitcher (Hopeford Hopeington).

Another script I wrote that wasn’t used can be found here – Bingo!, the idea was to play Bingo, once to show a rising hope as the numbers were called out, a second time to show diminishing hope where you were out once your number was revealed. The sketch focuses on a winner, and was unfinished, but used as a basis for something a little different. I though the premise was good enough to post, so feel free to give it a look!

So that is that! The end of Question until the next mad dash to fit in idea generation, script writing, video making and acting. It’s a good job I love doing it!